Rowing back on inequality

A camp run by the Equality and Human Rights Commission might seem an unlikely attraction for teenagers, but the outdoor course is inspiring a diverse range of young people to start campaigning. By Martin Wainwright

The Our Space camp takes teenagers from as far apart as Berkshire and Toxteth and pitches them together in the Lake District. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Whatever the turmoil engulfing the high command of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, its future teenage army is having a high old time on zip-lines and high-wires in the Lake District.

Strung out, blindfolded, in a crocodile on an orienteering exercise, they may resemble some of the recent goings-on around the leadership of the EHRC. But there the comparisons end.

The commission's second Our Space summer camp is one part of the embattled quango's work that is going like a rocket. Punit Patel, 16, grinning from ear to ear, calls it simply: "The best five days of my life." Callum Dixon, propelling his wheelchair along a track by Windermere, says: "It's hard work, but no way would I have missed it."

Life isn't as exciting - or as diverse - for either teenag er, back home in Leicester and Hertfordshire, and that is the camp's point. It's a simple idea, successfully piloted last year, of gathering 100-odd people, aged 14 to 16, from the widest possible range of backgrounds and pitching them together in the wild and lovely grounds of Lakeside YMCA.

Energy and imagination

Board, lodging and everything else are free, but to win a place the teenagers had to write manifestos about equality and human rights, and how their energy and imagination could promote both. "We got some marvellous ideas," says Gabriela Flores, the commission's camp leader, who used a network of schools and media adverts to reach kids from as far apart as public schools in Berkshire and inner-city schools in Toxteth, Liverpool. "We wanted to tap that feeling young teenagers have that they can change the world and do a better job than we have done."

The students don't need any extra spark, but they do need guidance. The camp uses the old boarding school principle of always providing something to do, from breakfast at 8am to bed at 11pm when everyone goes out like lights. If there is surplus energy, the last day exhausts it with a night-time hike up the fell behind the camp, using skills and mutual trust developed in those lurching, blindfolded crocodiles earlier on.

"Things can fall apart," says Diane Allen, supervising an orienteering group where a discreet battle for leadership is going on between three boys. "But that's part of the learning process."

On the other side of a shingle bay, 14-year-old Katie Briggs, from Berkshire, is giving an object lesson in how to take charge firmly but fairly. "I got them focused by telling them to tuck in their shirts," she says, after winning bouquets from her 10-strong team for a leadership test that got them through a spider's web net without touching any of the ropes. "You need to do things like ask the quiet ones if they have any ideas, rather than just assuming they'll speak up."

The gelling of opposite types, essential for Our Space to work, is helped by peer leaders, young veterans of the pilot camp who include 15-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, star (as Lyra Bellaqa) of The Golden Compass, the film of the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels. She was told about the camp by an aunt involved with a youth group, and her five days last summer inspired her to come back.

"It's great when you go home afterwards and try to show other people what you've learned here," she says. "Everyone who comes to Our Space goes home with a different mindset. It's completely different from being told these things in lessons or speeches. We sort it out together. It's interactive. And what you do afterwards is what really counts, because that's when we can make a difference."

That is the long-term purpose of the camp - creating equality ambassadors to reach young people before prejudices of all kinds can take root. In between outdoor sessions, the teenagers brainstorm about ways they can work in future towards the commission's aims: running school assemblies, getting groups of friends together, or making an effort to explore other culturally or socially different communities.

Chit-chat leads to grander schemes: three campers from Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle found this year that they all had overpriced bus fares in common. They're now in the early stages of planning a three-city youth campaign to bring prices down.

"We get established young campaigners in to meet them during the camp, with that in mind," says Flores. "It gets across the idea that they can actually do these things, rather than dream about them." Sessions were led this year by Tom Robbins, who set up the action group Random Acts of Kindness, and a group of teenagers who started their own free newspapers.

Every camper then wrote themselves a stamped addressed postcard setting out their ideas for action back at home, and handed them back in. Flores and her team will post them off in three weeks' time to remind them that this is what they are now supposed to do.

It works, says Neerali Pattni, 16, another peer leader from a Leicester comprehensive, who was blushingly shy when she went to the pilot camp. "The equality commission said they would support us in anything we did afterwards, and that's just what they have done."

Campers get certificates, leaflets, one-to-one support sessions and a discreet hand, if necessary, to win over headteachers or parents who may be cautious about unofficial activism. But plenty still rests on the teenagers' shoulders. "It's kind of scary," says Claire McLaughlin, 14, from Belfast. "I'm the only one from Ireland; everyone else can get together over here. But I reckon that if I can get through to even just one person, that person might tell their friends, and they'll tell their friends. That's how you get a chain reaction."

As one of the first of the ambassadors to graduate from the camp, Neerali Pattni started off that way, spreading the word to friends and family, one by one. Combating prejudice was one challenge, but so was the problem of timidity in her own community about making an effort to get out and make different friends.

Reaching out

"Sometimes that's hard," she says, "but I keep saying to them: 'Look, it's really better to mix, because that way you find out about all sorts of different backgrounds, which can be really interesting, as well as helping understanding.'"

It sounds worthy, but worthiness isn't on the agenda of the teenagers, who know that they won't make equality and diversity cool by preaching about their virtues. Hannah Mezler, 15, who lives only a few miles away in largely monocultural Ulverston, says the attraction isn't that - it's just the thrill of meeting so many "different but normal" people her own age, from all over Britain.

Briggs agrees. "We have a sort of diversity at school - chavs and goths and that," she says. "But this is something else. I keep saying to myself, look at all these people you'd never ever meet in the little town where I live. And hey, they're really nice."

Then it was back to more leadership sessions, discussions on diversity and some sparky challenges to the camp's own organisation. Richards and others criticised the "stereotyping" of a colour system, new this year, which divided the teenagers on arrival into yellows (lively), blues and greens (quiet and patient) and red (well-organised). As she says: "We're each of us a mixture. There's good and bad in everyone."

I asked the staff if any EHRC commissioners would be coming to listen to this sort of reasoning, and maybe have a go at Briggs's leadership session. Apparently not; it's holiday time, more's the pity.